Beware the jub-jub bird and shun
The frumious bandersnatch.
Claimed Kripke: We can know, therefrom, that “bandersnatches” are all, or are mostly, “frumious.”
Claimed I: We can assume it only if we decide Carroll was a bad writer. If all, or even most, bandersnatches are frumious, then there is no need for the writer to say so. If we assume Carroll was a good writer, however, frumious bandersnatches are likely as rare as green fire engines.
What possibly neither of us realized at the time was that Kripke’s argument really hinged on the previous line: The verbs “beware” and “shun,” set as they are in regular meter, evoke a discourse (and thus suggest a reading of the following line and its diction) that comes from an epoch before the modernist writing discourse my initial argument calls up, when, indeed, certain nouns were allowed “epithets”—an epithet being an adjective or set of modifiers that underline a self-evident quality that all acknowledge: the noble Brutus, the shining sun, the pitch-black night… Set by the formality of the diction of “beware,” “shun,” and the regularity of the meter, Kripke read “frumious” as an epithet for bandersnatch — whereas I chose to read it as an ordinary adjective. But “Jabberwocky” is a humorous poem. Who is to say where bathos, irony, and anachronism might not be read into its lines?
We can surmise many things about imaginary objects — more or less intelligently. But we can’t know anything about them.
There is, indeed, an equally interesting argument to be formulated about imaginary aspects of actual objects. Are, for example, all birds “jub-jub”…?
The second thing that is not written about is that which we consider personally unimportant: for example, the true amount of muddle in the world. It was the Great God Muddle that some critic cited as the titular deity of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. But even there the fictive expression of muddle in no way reflects its real prevalence: this morning I got up and, still in my underwear, walked four times back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen, looking for my coffee cup from yesterday, till, on a whim, I went into the study to find the cup sitting, where I had left it, beside my word processor. Yesterday, before going to my office at the university, I purchased a bagel and cream cheese, a glass bottle of cranberry juice, and a pecan square from the local bakery. Once in my office, I sat all the breakfast items on the edge of my crowded desk. Reaching for a pencil, I knocked the bottle of juice off the edge of the desk. Fortunately it hit the leg of my computer table, was deflected, so landed rolling and did not break. I dived to retrieve it, but the hand I grabbed the edge of the desk with moved a piece of paper, which the still paper-wrapped bagel was sitting on, so that it now fell to the floor. I put the juice on the desk and hurriedly turned to pick up the bagel, and my hand knocked the pecan square onto the floor —
All of them came up, went back on the desk, and I proceeded to eat my breakfast, trying not to dwell on the fact that I’d managed to knock every bit of it over. In the course of working on the revisions to this piece here, this afternoon I consumed most of a meal in eight or nine desultory trips to the refrigerator, most to get a single salami slice from the brown rumple of butcher paper wedged on the side of the second shelf — and, in one case, a spoonful from the container of cottage cheese — each trip immediately all-but-forgotten once it was over and I’d returned to the word processor here, to continue typing.
The conceit of the literary is that such things happen only in comedy, and are otherwise rare. But the truth is, they make up a disturbing percentage of our lives. We choose to look at them only through the esthetic framing of the comedic, which, by that framing, reassures us such happenings are not of major import. The truth is, however, that a good percentage of our lives is not just comic; it’s slapstick.
The third area that is not written about is simply the socially proscribed: To what great period of literary achievement could an alien turn to learn of the workings of human life and society — the age of Greek tragedy, Japanese Haiku, the 19th Century Russian Novel, Medieval Chinese court poetry, High Modernism, the Victorian Novel, or the English Romantic Poets? — to discover that, say, human beings are creatures who, all of them, male, female, and child, have to void their bowels once or twice a day and empty their bladders between three and ten times in every twenty-four-hour period?
What poems or stories tell us that, in any random American crowd, about a third, between once and three times a week, take a small wad of wet toilet paper or cleaning rag and vigorously and carefully wipe away the hair, body scalings, and dust from the porcelain span between the back of the commode seat and the flush tank — while the other two-thirds are largely oblivious that such a job ever has to be done at all?
Neither Swift’s exclamations over Celia’s excretory functions nor Joyce’s narration of Bloom’s bath conveys such fundamental human facts.
Speaking of Joyce, how many readers of Ulysses today, I wonder, recall that the center of the controversy over the novel’s supposed obscenity was the end of the Lotus-Eaters (section five), in which Bloom, by himself, takes a bath and observes his own pubic hair and genitals breaking the surface of the soapy water (“… a languid, floating flower”) — a scene, that, when I first read it at sixteen, I found jarringly erotic?
40. A memory remains with me from a winter visit, some twenty-five or more years ago, to the reading room of the New York Public Library. The late afternoon dimmed outside the high windows above the wrought iron balcony circling the hall, while yellow light puddled the long wooden tables under the reading lamps’ green glass shades. After waiting on the pew-like bench before the barred window under the mechanical-electric call board, with its black frame and red numbers aglow behind the ground glass, I went to the wooden window when my red number lit to receive my volumes. Minutes later, at one of the tables, my coat shrugged over the chair-back behind me, I began reading over the works in various pamphlets and books of the poet Samuel Bernhard Greenberg (1893–1917), copying out vivid lines or striking stanzas into my spiral notebook, as, up in the little town of Woodstock, New York, in the last, chilly weeks of 1923, Hart Crane had made similar copies from the Greenberg manuscripts, then in the possession of William Murrell Fisher. My visit produced an epigraph to a chapter in a novel I finished perhaps two years later.
But a return visit to the library only this past June — the same mechanical callboard, though it may have been repaired, has not been replaced — netted me an interesting revelation. In the novel, where I quoted him at the head of the seventh chapter, Greenberg’s name, I now find, was inadvertently spelled “Greenburg.” And in none of the books currently among the Public Library stacks can I find the poem I quoted a quarter of a century ago.
It’s tempting, then, to imagine all these vanished texts, along with their writers, if not the libraries in which the texts are on store, as inhabiting an alternate city, distinctly separate from ours, yes — yet closer, distressingly closer, than any of us has hitherto imagined.
41. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is water…
42.
And then went down to the chips, set wheel to gambit, forth on the Reno night.